Thursday, February 21, 2013

Fear and Loathing in Wallasey as Wirral Council Prepares the Axe

A section of the march walking from Seacombe Ferry

On Monday evening, a couple of hundred demonstrators marched
from Seacombe Ferry to Wallasey Town Hall, before four hundred packed into the
council chamber to witness the Wirral cabinet recommend massive cuts to local government services. As they did so, one carer mother pledged to “chuck
myself in the docks” if – as seems a strong possibility – her day centre is closed. Throughout, the
atmosphere was tensely balanced between the council’s need to give the
appearance of listening, and the pure rage and despair that they therefore needed
to grant an audience. This was liberal democracy being stretched to its absolute limit.

The march was called by the Unison union, with the blue Unison
banners and flags taking their place at the head of the procession. It went at
quite a slow pace, and took maybe fifteen minutes to walk the relatively small
distance. However, along the way almost every single driver seemed to signal
their support by beeping their car horn or raising their fist in solidarity
gestures.

When we arrived at the council building, we were met by performers
from one of the threatened youth community groups. They performed skilful break
dances and other manoeuvres to the sound of several hit pop songs. The waiting
protesters clapped along to the rhythm and one generous man offered people cups
of hot vegetable soup for free. Spirits were high.

Once we got inside for the cabinet meeting though, the mood
changed dramatically, and high tension was palpable. The large rectangular room
was arranged with the executive’s table at the front, ahead of twenty rows of
twenty chairs, where Unison supporters but overwhelmingly service users and
relatives were seated. At the back in a raised gallery, a few dozen people who
would soon reveal themselves to be Labour supporters (and likely councillors)
were perched.

When the officials walked in, led by council leader Phil Davies,
the air was suddenly filled with boos, jeering whistles, and cries of “bastards”
and “murderers”. Hundreds of members of the public stamped their feet,
creating an atmosphere which must have been intimidating for the suited and
booted politicians, who – even with security guards and police present – were vastly
outnumbered by those who despised them.

Once the tide of open hostility had receded, Davies
declared the meeting open, and ordered that a freshly printed “Executive
Summary” of the budget proposals be handed out to each member of what he termed “the audience”. It quickly became apparent that the wording – if not
the actual detail – of the summary had been crafted precisely because the
politicians had been made slightly timid by the reception they’d got at
previous meetings.

I will leave a breakdown of the proposal’s specifics to another article, but for now suffice to say that the emphasis was
deliberately placed on listing what will be ‘saved’ from the slashing of the
budget by one third, rather than what will be taken away by the Wirral Labour
administration. For example, “We will retain pensioner discounts for Council
Tax” can be translated as ‘We will cut all Council Tax discounts except for
those going to pensioners’ (not just coincidentally the age group with highest
voter turnout come election time).

The light-hearted mood outside the town hall was soon replaced

The chairman emphasised how much the executive had “listened”
to people, through the consultation exercise (loudly described as a “farce” by
one “audience” member), and through the trade unions (indeed, the Executive
Summary claims a dozen meetings have taken place with union officials in the
last three months).

Local Unison branch secretary Joe Taylor was then invited to stand
before the budget cabinet and give a speech. This he falteringly did over ten
minutes. At first he acknowledged the huge strength of feeling from the many
service users who made up the vast bulk of the assembled crowd, and the immense
harmful impact the cuts would have on their lives. However, he pointedly
refused to call for the scrapping of all cuts.

Instead, he spared Labour
blushes by laying responsibility for the cuts package at the door of the “ConDem”
coalition government, and not the local Labour Party for drawing them up and
enforcing them in Wirral. “We won’t forget who’s responsible come the general election”
he added, in an attempt to spread the illusion that a national Labour Party
equally committed to austerity would serve working class people any better than
the current inhabitants of Downing Street. He then made a plaintive plea for the
council to "give me something" which he could sell as a victory to his
membership, or else strike action could not be ruled out. Implicit in this
statement was the idea that the union had brought hundreds of
people to the council chamber, and the union could make sure they
didn’t come back if the council made one almost empty gesture.

In the hall, his speech was received with applause if not
much enthusiasm. Uninvited speakers from the general public won much more
support, as they walked nervously but furiously forward to air their
grievances. One woman in particular earned the empathy of everyone on the
floor with her tearful description of how hard her life as a carer for her child
already is, and how unbearable it will become if and when her day centre is closed. She bluntly declared that she would feel compelled to kill herself, but
the men on the platform remained literally unmoved at this.

When yet another woman moved forward to speak, Davies clearly began to panic that he was losing control of proceedings. He announced that he would
not allow any further speakers, and that the cabinet were “not going to listen
any more”. This was an ironic twisting of his earlier comments about how much
the council were listening, and it
provoked uproar. Clearly, ‘listening’ was ok in manageable bite size chunks –
from just a tiny percentage of the Wirral’s population during a “consultation”,
or from one trade unionist. However, once it threatened business as usual,
it was to be stamped on. But he’d not banked on the depth of anger, so after around half a minute of shouting, the woman
was eventually allowed to speak.

Throughout proceedings, a particularly bizarre but important
role was played by the Labour supporters in the gallery above. As I stated
earlier, they can only have been Labour politicians, because literally no-one
else on the planet could be that passionately partisan about Labour! At times
when the air was filled with particularly class conscious yells about how “You’re
all the same!” and “Labour is just as much to blame”, those above loudly joined
in with bellows along the lines of “Blame Eric Pickles”, “Ask Nick Clegg”, or
most blatantly on a divide and conquer strategy: “North-South divide!”

In various ways, the public’s anger had been released and
managed, and the budget recommendations had been passed by the cabinet, for
full council to vote up or down on Tuesday 5th March.

It seems likely that the council will give Unison their
crumb of comfort, in an attempt to buy off a section of the crowd and divide
the rest. It would also be astonishing if the Labour majority cheering on their
colleagues this week did not wield their axe a fortnight later. In Wirral – as
everywhere else – cuts could then only be successfully fought by a strong rank-and-file
alliance of affected workers and services users. This alliance must be formed,
and quickly.

Further articles on the Wirral situation will be published in the
coming days.

Spock as Interplanetary Mixed-Race Muse
-
Originally posted on thenerdsofcolor:
It seems that Spock and his mixed-species brethren and sistren haven’t
served as multiracial muses only to me and fell...